torture garden interview

The Torture Garden was started in 1990 and had its first events in a small, tucked away venue in Shepherds Bush called the Opera on the Green. Since then it has set the standard and maintained the cutting edge for what a fetish club should be, spawning a variety of offshoots, Tears of Eros, Club Flesh and Club Seed, and, over those years, in a variety of different venues too long to list. We caught up with its instigators, David Wood and Allen Pelling in their new Hackney office.

Interview by Mick Smith.

Allen: I had moved from Hastings to London and was running two Goth clubs, Subterfuge and Trapdoor and DJing at Slimelight and the Electric Ballroom. After a year we set up the Torture Garden in October 1990.

David: I had just come out of Fine Arts School and was into making experimental films at the time and so I was coming from that angle really. I had been going to clubs since about 83 or 84, had been on the Goth scene and wanted to go to a different kind of club. I had always thought about which kind of club I wanted to go to but never thought about actually doing it. I had shown visuals in clubs before and really wanted to work on the art side developing visuals. Plus I wanted to be involved in a club that I should want to go to myself. So starting Torture Garden with Allen I had a night club I wanted to go to, and being a fetish club as well, it was different. But initially it was almost like a club just for us and our mates and we had no ideas of making money or it being a long lasting idea.

A: For me it was already my job, doing clubs was how I earned my living, and for Dave it was an exciting thing to come in and do the visuals at the side of the club. We both always had two different views on TG but, luckily, we were able to make the club what it is. In 1990, I had been to some of the Skin Two parties and these provided a really good atmosphere because people were well dressed up. It was that stage in the Goth scene when people were not dressing up as much, so it was really nice to see everyone making an effort. The vibe of the club was very much one for the older people and so the music wasn't right for the younger crowd. It didn't really function well as a party and the shows were not relevant to what was going on, but there was still this exciting sexual edge to the whole proceedings which I liked a lot. I had begun to find the Goth scene very uninspiring where it had been really exciting only a year ago when I had just moved it had lost its edge. What happened to it? It seemed to stop being a movement and at the time there were lots of people who were artists who were into designing and were looking to expressing themselves rather than the scene becoming a place where people felt safe, if you know what I mean.

M: When you set up a club which had a kind of sensual/provocative/fetish edge to it, did you feel apprehensive about it and that you were entering an unknown area?

D: We knew that doing a fetish club in the early nineties was a little bit risky in itself with the police and the authorities, whether it was S&M or whether it was just sex , and we had various problems in the first couple of years. We were exposed in the tabloids, we lost the Opera on the Green as a result of an exposure and the club was doing something radically a little bit dangerous at that time. Everyone going to the club knew that it was a bit naughty, they could get into trouble and the place could get closed down. Now, you have to work really hard to get into trouble with a fetish club whatever you do.

A: Looking back on it when we first came up with it the idea of doing a fetish club, I don't think we ever sat down and thought "oh shit are we not going to be able to get away with this?" Once we were started and becoming successful we had so many people turn up at one of our events at the Opera, we couldn't physically take any more money on the door, and because the venue was run in a very lax way and we just kept the doors open including the fire exits and people were just drifting into the Shepherd's Bush precinct, and we did actually get into trouble for that. There were times that you were expecting the club to get raided especially when the fetish scene seemed to be getting a lot of attention from the police and fire and council authorities.

D: I suppose in a way we got too well known, perhaps if the club was obscure then no one would have cared, but once you become well known then you come to the attention of authority. Authority would rather stop it and keep it underground and maybe intimidate the venue somehow so that they would pull out, and we lost perhaps three venues in the space of a few months at one stage, and it was thought that the club could not and would not survive. We had always thought that we were doing something very natural and normal, and never believed that we were doing something ambivalent or risky.

A: We don't do what we are doing just because of the possibility it could be illegal. Sometimes at Mass I look around and think "this is totally fucking out of this world" because it is unbelievable what is actually going on around me.

D: Some of the things which are going on are very natural to do at a fetish club but there are certain laws we are now aware were being transgressed and we were pushing the boundaries of ever since we started - the club's always pushed boundaries of what's been legal. M: In the early nineties a club that was significant in having the cutting edge was unusual and your club was doing something that other people were trying to copy very soon. Were you quite decisive in the direction it would take from then? The reason I ask that is because you emerged in the mid nineties actually setting up two other clubs, Club Flesh and Club Seed, which attempt to cater for different tastes.

A: There was a point in the relationship between Dave and me, where we had to sit down and reflect - we were running Torture Garden together but I did other things as well, and basically at one point we had to decide to become business partners full time and take the whole enterprise more seriously. We didn't have an office for five years and just used to turn up in a pub and come up with ideas and that would decide the next thing. So there was a distinct point when we decided that we would work together on everything and that changed it to become a business where we were working five days a week and had to take on board the question of managing money. With the club's direction it's usually been decided on what we want to see on the scene, where there's a gap in the market, or something new that we would like to do that doesn't fit within the usual TG stuff. Looking at new stuff did work for the club and sometimes it didn't and a lot of it is experimenting.

M: You do a lot of events in other cities and abroad. How important is that to you? I mean you are clearly taking a little microcosm of Torture Garden to another country.

D: Well they really vary a lot, and sometimes we can just go along for a free holiday - see an interesting and unusual city and experience a free trip. But every time we go somewhere we discover something new about what fetish is about. Fetish is something different in every different city or country. The idea behind a fetish club the crowd can be totally different. So we have learnt a lot from seeing fetish in different parts of the world. Some countries can be very backward and quite retro in the fetish set up they have, yet some can be very progressive and comparable to London. Tokyo was every bit as good as London and better in some respects. America can be good and sometimes not so good, every city is totally different. In the UK, every city has a different balance in the crowd and we can only bring so much, and when we are mobile we can only bring a few performers with our music and visuals, but in the end we can say it is a Torture Garden performance because of the Torture Garden crowd. You can get big crowds in another city but it won 't be the same as Torture Garden.

A: We have found though, with the touring group and the visual side we have taken that it can make a difference to the party. The energies and the performers and the visuals, we're so blasé sometimes thinking, say, we are only taking Lucifire's performance and visuals, but for people who have never seen anything like the quite unique things which we offer it really does get the crowd going and they can get a vibe of where TG comes from.

D: We've got a lot better at it as well because on our initial tours, when it was just two or three people it didn't really function that well, but with a group of five people we can pretty much put visuals, music and fashion shows into every performance now. So using a small group we can really get an atmosphere of the how Torture Garden is on the other side of the world. And even if the crowd is different it is half way there to being a Torture Garden.

D: For what goes on in a fetish club I suppose there has become a formula for it, and we have kind of written that formula up to a point. When we started the club we knew we wanted a really good dance floor, a kind of chill out S&M area, and there should be a stage with some performances going on. Also there should be some stimulating visuals.

D: It is like a party and the crowd make their own night as well. We kind of give the stimulus, but at the end of the day every person's evening is different, you know, who they meet, who they sleep with, who they spank that night, their conversations, every person's perceptions of their own evening is going to be different, it is up to them to make a good evening for themselves as well. I think you have got to allow the crowd to make their own entertainment and have that input. We can begin to inspire them and make it more interesting for them.

M: How do you get on with the other clubs on the fetish scene? And I am thinking of say, Submission, the Skin Two parties and, say, Club Rub?

D: Fine, now, - I think we get on seeing that what we do is very different from any other club and so I have never really seen us as competing as such. There obviously is a sense of rivalry at times, but what we do is so different, and when we started we wanted to be so different that there wasn't a club which was comparable or competing with Torture Garden. Although, at times we have been competing with Submission in terms of numbers and who is the biggest club, it wasn't really competing about what kind of club it was. If you were a fan of Submission then you could hate TG and if you liked TG then you could hate Submission. Also there was an element of the crowd that liked both of them.

A: Remember, the scene is quite small, and very social and over ten or eleven years the people who you have met in clubs are your friends - you've been abroad with some of them and you see others all the time, you end up helping each other out and looking after each other. We sit down with Club Rub and they tell us their dates and if we see we have a clash we try to see if either one of us can move our date. So we work like that and we allow each other to hand out flyers inside each others events.

D: At the end of the day to run a fetish club and keep it going is quite a hard thing so whether it's running Submission or Club Rub, then to actually survive on the scene is an achievement and they need the respect of other people who have actually kept going. No one does it for the money, you do it because you love and are interested in what you are doing and you believe in the club.

M: You Allen, you come from the Goth scene, and it could be argued that you do as well, David, - do you think Torture Garden is in some way Gothic, looking at it in a wider sense?

D: It's totally Gothic - We've always thought it's what a Gothic club would be now. You know, TG is not a Gothic club for the eighties, Torture Garden is a Gothic club for the year 2001.

A: This is the thing,- when Goth clubs started it wasn't called "Goth" at all, as far as I am aware, it got labelled Gothic later. I suppose to name it an Alternative club would have given it a better image. To call it a Gothic club has such a stereotypical image, like a fetish club gets a stereotypical image. The dark side has always been a turn on for me and I find the Torture Garden one of the darkest clubs going. The whole vibe, the show, the visuals and everything like that. Probably it's always a bit more about the vibe than the music. For me it is still one of the most alternative clubs, if not the most alternative club going.

M: One of the problems is that, on the Goth scene, there are some fundamentalists who have a formula for what Goth clubs do and the music they play. How do you relate to what is current Goth music?

A: It is hard to say. For me, Goth music served a purpose in my life when I was, say, seventeen through to about twenty three, it dealt with what was going on in my life and then, I guess, I just cheered up! I just found that being a Goth DJ had become really repetitively boring, and when you try to play something new, you really have to work to get it going. As a clubber, I was always a person who would turn up and if it sounded good I would dance to it anyway and not wait till I could make sure I knew it. It was like going to experience new stuff and taking on new things and I think the most creative and challenging time in any of my clubs was during the first three was when I hardly knew any of the songs.

D: Cybergoth? Well I think we did the sort of cybergoth in about ninety three, didn't we, and for me musically, you know I am still with the dark side of music. I came in with Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV and Coil and music like that and if music is progressive and experimental then dark music is still really interesting. I can't sit and listen to Sisters of Mercy- esque music and take it seriously, when I heard it almost twenty years ago, I find it's not interesting now and can't be. If someone is taking a dark atmosphere and making it interesting like Diamanda Galas, or like Coil then that is what appeals me now. Otherwise, for me now Drum and Bass is the Throbbing Gristle for the year 2000 and that is far darker and interesting than the second rate Sisters of Mercy-esque bands in retro Goth. I believe Torture Garden goes through cycles of getting bored with things and trying new things, the last year we have been going through fun, eclectic music and maybe we are approaching to a stage now where music is getting a bit darker and experimental and becoming interesting again for us, so I wouldn't put it out of the question to go back into a more dark extreme music side. But it won't be retro sounding Goth.

A; I think they are great people, upstanding people (laughs). No, I mean, compared to "the Americans"!

D: I think it can be sort of silly and cliched, as in when you get the bats and that kind of gothic stuff. I quite like the area of darker vampire things and I find that quite interesting and quite weird.

M; Would you feel the ethos of Torture Garden was associated with the kind of imagery that you get with the Redemption videos from Nigel Wingrove?

D: It's different but it is related, and I used to like Nigel Wingrove's imagery a lot when we started the club - it is lesser now but still, lesbian nuns, vampires and nazis is the kind of the thing that still does it for me occasionally.

M: You've got a merchandising area where you produce cds and t shirts. Do you see yourselves as developing that?

A: There's definitely some avenues that we could get into, for example, a shop, the perfect fetish shop or something like that. We could also do magazines and more books, we always keep our eyes and ears open for all avenues of opportunity.

D: We have options in the sense that there was business we could have done, but there are things that we totally believe in as well, and we are interested in books because there is a whole range publications which go with the concept. The music side has a lot to do with it as well, otherwise people would think we are just cashing in on things. There are things we have achieved which we never thought when we started the club , we've made a book, we've met some fantastic artists around the world who are really famous.

A: Having published a book which is used for research into subculture and is one of the leading materials for this is an achievement. I'd like to be doing a club that would go down in history like the KitKat club was legendary, and maybe leave an impact that will inspire other people to do their own clubs. I feel that, with Torture Garden it has influenced others, people have got bored with the superclub thing and don't just want to go out dancing drinking and doing drugs, they want entertainment, more eclectic sound systems and more of the performers who are out there.

D: For us being extreme and pushing the boundaries was always something we wanted to do with the club and this meant wanted to put on more and more extreme shows over the years. Perhaps in recent years that's become almost boring in itself with just another hook hanging or another piercing show - it's bizarre to say another hook hanging could be boring but they have almost become like that we ourselves have seen it . I think the show we had at the last Torture Garden (Halloween)was perhaps the first one which really did genuinely shock and surprise people again. It was quite nice that the crowd didn't know what was real and what was fake and that was almost more disturbing because it really blurred the lines between reality and illusion - and they didn't know what to expect whereas if we have a hook hanging we more or less know the formula of how it fits in. It was show where we didn't really know what was going to happen next or where it was going to go and that was when I saw a Torture Garden crowd both surprised and shocked genuinely for the first time in quite a while and that we like.

M: When you did that special show before last Christmas - the Body Probe one - did that really draw in a different kind of crowd?

D: Yes, that event wasn't a club event, it wasn't a fetish event although there were a lot of fetish people there , some from the TG scene, some from the gay scene, there were a lot of people from arts schools there - the body art, tattoo and piercing crowd were there who used to come to Torture Garden and perhaps are not coming to clubs now. So perhaps about half the crowd were really clubbers. Others were from the arts scene or the body art scene and it was quite a different event because of that. And we thought that was quite a fantastic evening, something different for us to do that and without any arts funding - that can make it difficult when you try to put on expensive shows as there is a limited market for it but it , and it turned out to be one of the most rewarding and satisfying events we did last year.

A: That was the first body hanging, body suspension ritual performed in public that I know of in this country, and it cost us money to do it , but we put it on and we did it because it was an amazing event. Looking back over ten years, Torture Garden was both cutting edge and alternative, and yet now we are mainstream in the sense that we are in the public domain and we've featured all over the place.

D: Well I had loads of books and we went through them when we shared a flat together and produced a list of names. Quite a few of them were the names of books and we ended up with about four or five we liked : I had just bought the book Torture Garden myself and not really read it but I did just like the images it evoked. It wasn't really about what the book's content more because it sounded like an exotic far away and mysterious place. I think the top three names we had were Torture Garden, Tears of Eros, which we used for our S&M events and Club Flesh was from the film Café Flesh, so they were the three top ones we came up with and we have used all three. I think that the fact of having Torture Garden the word Torture itself in the name can make the club a little more hard core sounding that's also to protect the club from becoming too mainstream and diluted.

D: That's given us an extra music room which we haven't had before and we now have three nice big rooms for the three main areas. The management are great with us and will do anything we want with installations - we'd have thought about the Complex or the Paradise which were similar to Mass in some ways Electrowerkz was fantastic at the time.

A: Electrowerkz - that got us our identity I think - the attention to detail we put in to that place just created from the moment people entered to the moment people left, I think it established that atmosphere which transformed the venue so that people were totally blown away when they entered the main club itself. The Gregorian chants quite inspired people - they were already excited!

D: Even though it was a venue a lot of people were familiar with we did different things with it on the staircase and performers behind closed metal cages, people just camped up the staircase and that just added a bit of theatricality to it.

D: You get frustrated when you've got all these ideas and then the venue doesn't physically allow them and you lose that idea or one wrong decor just doesn't work. There are venues where it's only half way there and you end up frustrated with it. Perhaps Leisure Lounge was a pretty good venue, but it just wasn't quite right, you know, one room's too big and the decor is not working . So there has never been a totally disastrous venue as such but there were times when it should have and could have been better.

A; It was very frustrating because, until we went to Mass, we were still on a midweek night, still on Thursday nights, and we had, five years ago, five, six hundred people coming out on a Thursday night to an event because many people did not want to miss it. Then people started saying "well I'll go next time" with this belief that it was going to be around for ever. We've done cutting and branding and all that extreme stuff and there was no more extreme unless you actually killed someone, but the numbers started to drop off and our expenses got higher every time we tried to bring in performances and stuff like that, so we started to suffer with numbers especially with it being midweek. It's difficult getting weekend venues, the Aquarium didn't really work for us and Happy Jack's years ago didn't work that well, so we have had our mistakes and we've never used those venues again.

D: There's not that many venues in London and that's the trouble, - once you've got a venue with three rooms you take that for granted - I mean if we lost Mass now we would be totally messed up. We could probably pull quite a big venue which has got a good name now, but it wouldn't have the rooms we need and to repeat what we do now at Mass somewhere else would be very difficult.

D: Every year we have this discussion and we view ahead, but we never go too far ahead because it's got to be on the ball with things changing and evolving. You can't really plan as much as a year ahead because the whole world can change, the whole club can change in a year. We thought between ourselves that we have got some exciting themes for next year but we can't really look too far beyond that, and also we've got lots of offshoot projects on the go.

A: As a club, our biggest thing is that we do our eleventh birthday party next year at the Brixton Academy - and that is a real challenge for us, because we can do Mass and do other events now, not standing on our heads but we've got so much experience at doing it that we need to challenge our creative potential with a venue of bigger size and that's a really interesting project for us. Our birthday parties are a specially big showplace the and should be a grandiose big celebration about successfully doing a club for another year. Giving people a bit more of the grand scale of what we can do - it gives a bit more scope to actually do other things , and, for example, we have got art galleries there, much more space, larger dungeons, probably more than we actually need.

D: We've done the Ministry or Fabric for the last five years birthday party wise, and it used to be really special at the Ministry of Sound - it was a huge big thing. No we haven't felt that that for so long because our own regular events at Mass are pretty much the same size as the Ministry of Sound, and to use the Ministry again would be just another average event. There are so few venues which are bigger than the Ministry, and there isn't much of a choice other than the Brixton Academy. It's a big step when you are taking on a venue that size big but after eleven years we really need a challenge. Whether we lose or just don't make any money we do see it as a challenge for us, and also it is guaranteed to give them a challenge as well. I think a lot of people, including ourselves are really curious to see what it's going to be like - and that's very different and very exciting.

For more information on the Torture Garden go to www.torturegarden.com

For Torture Garden inspired clothing go to www.tgclothing.com